You used to be able to, with some difficulty/complexity, script the web panel actions to add sub-domains and such, but Dreamhost had to captcha it because a few individuals “abused” the privilege and created thousands of subdomains for SEO purposes.

Because of this, I suspect that it’s highly unlikely that we’ll see API’s for such operations.

It would certainly be nice if the technical staff figured out a good way of making the API available in a way that prevented abuse.

Jan

Well, they could add a limit to the number off API requests in a hour or day like 10 subdomain creations/day…

Just continuing the thought experiment… Would this be sufficient? It could result in 3650 subdomains created every year.

I also wonder whether it could be gotten around by creating throwaway panel users will full privileges. Your main account could create 10 throwaway panel users per day. If each can create 10 subdomains, that’s 100 subdomains a day. In fact, since the “throwaway” panel users can create other panel users, there’s actually an infinite number of subdomains that could be created by the virally replicating panel users.

Maybe the API calls could be limited by the underlying account rather than by user?

I wonder if interactive panel accounts could be made to not be subject to this? Or in the ideal case, they could be made to not display the captcha until 10 qualifying “API” events were made!